Sunday, July 20, 2014

Some Thoughts on Going 14/14H 25 Man After Being 14/14H 10 Man

Long time, no post. Real life has been hell and in my smaller amount of free time than I'd like I've been busy with three separate projects:

1. Transitioning my guild from a 10 man heroic raiding guild (14/14H) to a 25 man heroic raiding guild (14/14H).
2. Finishing a project in NWN, which is something I'll have an upcoming post on regarding class balance in RPGs and various conundrums of healing systems.
3. Helping another NWN module author beta test and polish a module.

So let's talk about #1 up there for a bit. <Despotism> is a two night (Sun/Mon from 7:30 CST to 11:30-12:00 CST) guild I formed at the end of WotLK well after the zone buff had begun. It consisted of 4 real life friends plus myself and we PUGed our way each week to 11/12H in 10 man. Fast forward to Cataclysm with increased 10 man difficulty. We decided to get an actual raiding team together and, after lots of recruitment and slowly progressing, we managed to go from 5 players PUGing the first first bosses to a team that killed 7/13H with our last kill being Heroic Nefarian. First Alliance guild to do that on our realm, too, and it put us on the map.

We kept improving the roster during Firelands and killed Heroic Ragnaros while current, getting server first and being the top two night a week guild in the US (possibly world, I forget). Been full clearing heroics every tier since then and, as I recall, been the top two night guild in the US throughout our history. Got murkier in Siege of Orgrimmar since 25 man guilds killed the dramatically easier 25H Garrosh before we killed the harder 10H Garrosh. Mythic solves that problem, I suppose.

Speaking of Mythic, we had to get ready for it! After we killed Heroic Garrosh on 10 man we began slowly recruiting so we could transition to 25 man. Six weeks ago we were able to do so and got 13/14H our first week as a 25 man. Killed Heroic Garrosh three weeks after that (had some undergeared people and had to replace some people) on 25H and we'll kill him a third time by the end of this week (hopefully tomorrow, potentially on Monday).

Let me put this frankly: recruiting sucked.

Granted, it was harder for us as a fairly niche guild -- casual two nights with hardcore skill requirements, you might say. Very small recruitment pool and maybe other guilds had it easier. But thank goodness we were 14/14H as I cannot imagine how painful it would have been otherwise. I suspect a lot of guilds are going to die off with this turmoil.

Strangely enough, now that we're 14/14H on 25 man we're getting quite a few good applicants! The Catch-22 of raiding.

Going to talk some more in other posts about some of the changes we've had to make in terms of guild policies and raid environment but this is already a reasonably long post. So I wanted to finish this by discussing each boss for 10H versus 25H (this analysis is assuming equal gear, which we obviously didn't have but I'm extrapolating).

Heroic Immerseus
Holy cow this fight is a complete joke on 25 man. The new heroic mechanic is irrelevant and the puddles are so easy to control with this many people. Went from being harder than Protectors/Norushen/Galakras/Nazgrim on 10H to definitely being the easiest heroic.

Protectors
Not much to say about this fight, about the same, except more zergable due to the all the extra cooldowns.

Norushen
Definitely can get a lot crazier with a lot more adds for people to control up top, had to be a bit more careful than on 10 man, still easy as long as you're not greedy with purifying people.

Sha of Pride
About the same as 10 man. We spread out and ignore the Gift of the Titans buff (unlike 10H), have to deal with two more prisons, and have two adds to kill...but we have a lot more cooldowns to use as well.

Galakras
Basically the same.

Iron Juggernaut
Much easier than 10 man, more cooldowns to throw at problems.

Dark Shaman
Easier but not obscenely so like some of the other fights.General Nazgrim
Joke on both sizes.

Now we get to the harder bosses!

Malkorok
Much easier than 10 man, soaking puddles is trivial. Only thing more difficult is taunting all three adds in.

Spoils
Basically the same.

Thok
Easier but in a weird way. Instead of needing 3 groups of people during screech phase we only needed two. Screech hits for a lot more proportionally but, as I might have mentioned, we have a lot more cooldowns to use as well. About the same post-nerf.

Siegecrafter
Still easier on 25 man post-nerf (unless you have an insane 10 man composition), so much more CC to control mines.

Paragons
Surprise, Paragons is still harder on 25 man, though all the extra gear means it's mainly "DON'T STAND IN THE RAPID FIRE OR FIERY LINES OR CAUSTIC AMBER!" 95% of wipes were due to people standing in the metaphorical fire (and there is so much of it). It's a fight where we expect to have people dead at the end, though that will improve.

Garrosh
Hard to say. It's a lot easier to trivialize the DPS check for Garrosh on 25 man with kiting but at the same time it's REALLY not that hard to just "spread out, kill adds" on 10 man (all the gear and 4/4 upgrades makes the DPS check very easy to meet). The first intermission in Jade Serpent Temple is miles easier, that's the biggest difference at this point, I think. With much worse gear, though, 10H was definitely far harder since you couldn't kite the adds for extra DPS and the first intermission was absolutely brutal.

Anyway, sorry for the absence, got some posts coming up on both how 25 guilds work differently from 10 mans and some RPG game mechanic discussion revolving around that NWN module I mentioned.

4 comments:

Nicely done! Congrats on successfully transition to 25H. Recruiting is honestly the most stressful/worst part about raid leading to me, so I totally empathize.

Interesting to see how a lot of the fights happen to be easier just because you have more tools at your disposal. Glad to see the devs are reducing the number of cool downs across the board, because while as a raid leader they help me trvivialize mechanics by a bit of diligent planning on my part, that much micromanagement ahead of time is annoying (See: Thok, Dark Animus).

Thanks! And recruiting is already frustrating enough in general, gets even worse when you're trying to convince people to join your 19 person raid team because you promise you'll be doing 25s soon. They still got to raid in the 10 man, of course, while we kept expanding...but people are a lot more willing to join a team that just needs to fill a spot that just opened up rather than a team needing half a dozen more people.

Yeah, the cooldowns on Thok are nuts. Also planned out Paragons/Garrosh extensively as well. Still would prefer not making macros with 20+ different cooldowns listed out for different parts of the fight.

About Me

I play a shadow priest in World of Warcraft and lead Despotism, a two night a week heroic raiding guild on Greymane (despotism.enjin.com).
I can be reached at balkothwarcraft at gmail dot com for any reason.